When renowned film director Péter Gárdos wrote the story, he intended it as a film script, but eventually he made it into a novel. “Fever at Dawn,” the love story of two Holocaust survivors―the author’s parents―has ever since sold in more than 20 territories.

What of the remnants of Eastern culture in the East itself? This is the question that prompted Krasznahorkai’s writing of Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens, which the author himself in one interview termed a “literary reportage” – not quite a novel, but something more than a travel diary.

"The stuff of this novel is closer to an anthropological or ethical description – it is more attuned to answering the question 'what sort of a being is man?' And in answering this it will treat other people’s opinions and beliefs as simple raw material, just as a doctor who gives a person an anaesthetic and does not take into account their sensitivities in other walks of life or worry about their nakedness."

The so-called intellectual elements ended up in my books as
naturally as a folk song would, in the manner of flowers of the field that had no knowledge of “high culture” or “deep philosophy”, and did
not even seek it.

The art collection of Milán Füst, one of the most influential figures in 20th century Hungarian literature, and his wife, Erzsébet Helfer. - Exhibition at the Petőfi Literary Museum, Budapest, open until 15 November 2015.